Neha Jia Ahmad, MD

I moved to the US from Pakistan when I was five, and grew up in the Midwest. I studied Anthropology and Philosophy at Columbia University, and afterwards worked on criminal justice reform for the ACLU. While there I decided to pursue medicine as a career, for which I pursued a pre-med post-baccalaureate certificate at Johns Hopkins. I obtained my MD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and my MPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and am now an emergency medicine resident in the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency (HAEMR) at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

My interest in this position stems from my passion for addressing gender disparities within EM. Since starting residency I have been struck by the challenges facing women and other gender minorities within our field: from experiencing gendered bias from patients and colleagues on an everyday basis to the structural challenges that decimate female retention in leadership and academics. During residency I have channeled this passion through the HAEMR Women’s Initiative; as co-chair, I have focused on establishing formal and informal peer mentorship opportunities so that junior residents have opportunities to learn strategies for resilience and success from those with more experience. I would love the opportunity to translate this to the national scale by collaborating on individual mentorship programs and collective networking opportunities for women in EM at different stages in their careers, as I believe that strengthening our relationships and peer support as gender minorities is crucial to our collective success.

I am currently the co-chair of the HAEMR Women’s Initiative, my residency’s internal program dedicated to supporting residents who are gender minorities. During medical school, I served for two years as advocacy chair of my school’s chapter of the Student National Medical Association. In that role I engaged students across multiple health related professions in a series of town halls to identify opportunities to improve the University’s policies and practices on diversity and inclusion and served as a liaison to the administration to identify opportunities for actionable change.